Half a Century eBook

This brought down the house, but brought no order,
and she sat down, smiling, a perfect picture of self-complaisance.

People thought the press unmerciful in its ridicule
of that convention, but I felt in it all there was
much forbearance. No words could have done justice
to the occasion. It was so much more ridiculous
than ridicule, so much more absurd than absurdity.
The women on whom that ridicule was heaped were utterly
incapable of self-defense, or unconscious of its need.
The mass of nobility seekers seemed content to get
before the public by any means, and to wear its most
stinging sarcasms as they would a new dress cap.

In those days I reserved all my hard words for men,
and in my notice of the convention mildly suggested
that it would have been better had Mrs. Oliver Johnson
been made president, as she had great executive ability
and a good knowledge of parliamentary rules. This
suggestion was received by the president as an insult
never to be forgiven, and in the Visiter defended
herself against it. I replied, and in the discussion
which followed she argued that the affairs of each
family should be so arranged that the husband and
wife would be breadwinner and housekeeper by turns,
day or oven half day about. He should go to business
in the forenoon, then in the afternoon take care of
baby and permit her to go to the office, shop or warehouse
from which came the family supplies.

I took the ground that baby would be apt to object,
and that in our family the rule would not work, since
I could not put a log on the mill-carriage, and the
water would be running to waste all my day or half-day
as bread-winner.

About the same time, Mrs. Stanton published a series
of articles in Mrs. Bloomer’s paper, the Lily,
in which she taught that it was right for a mother
to make baby comfortable, lay him in his crib, come
out, lock the door, and leave him to develop his lungs
by crying or cooing, as he might decide, while mamma
improved her mind and attended to her public and social
duties.

Against such head winds, it was hard for my poor little
craft to make progress in asserting the right of women
to influence great public questions.

For something over twenty years, after that Akron
meeting, I did not see a woman’s rights convention,
and in all have seen but five. Up to 1876 there
had been no material improvement in them, if those
I saw were a fair specimen. Their holders have
always seemed to me like a woman who should undertake
at a state fair to run a sewing machine, under pretense
of advertising it, while she had never spent an hour
in learning its use.